Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers eBook

The bringing together into close contact of Americans
from every section of our broad land is tending to
make a new amalgamated type. Even New Englanders
grow almost human here among their broader-minded
fellow-countrymen. Any northerner can say “nigger”
as glibly as a Carolinian, and growl if one of them
steps on his shadow. It is not easy to say just
how much effect all this will have when the canal
is done and this handful of amalgamated and humanized
Americans is sprinkled back over all the States as
a leaven to the whole. They tell on the Zone
of a man from Maine who sat four high-school years
on the same bench with two negro boys, and returning
home after three years on the Isthmus was so horrified
to find one of those boys an alderman that he packed
his traps and moved to Alabama, “where a nigger
is a nigger”—­and if there isn’t
the “makings” of a story in that I ’ll
leave it to the postmaster of Miraflores.

CHAPTER VIII

“There is much in this police business,”
said “the Captain,” with his slow, deliberate
enunciation, “that must lead to a blank wall.
Out of ten cases to investigate it is quite possible
nine will result in nothing. This percentage
could not of course be true of a thousand cases and
a man’s services still be considered satisfactory.
But of ten it is quite possible. As for knowing
how to do detective work, all I bring to the
department myself is some ordinary common sense and
a little knowledge of human nature, and with these
I try to work things out as best I can. This peeping-through-the-key-hole
police work I know nothing whatever about, and don’t
want to. Nor do I expect a man to.”

I had been discussing with “the Captain”
my dissatisfaction at my failure to “get results”
in an important case. A few weeks on the force
had changed many a preconceived notion of police life.
It had gradually become evident, for instance, that
the profession of detective is adventurous, absorbing,
heart-stopping chiefly between the covers of popular
fiction; that real detective work, like almost any
other vocation, is made up largely of the little unimportant
every-day details, with only a rare assignment bulking
above the mass. As “the Captain” said,
it was just plain every-day work carried on by the
application of ordinary common sense. Such best-seller
artifices as disguise were absurd. Not only would
disguise in all but the rarest cases be impossible,
but useless. The A-B-C of plain-clothes work
is to learn to know a man by his face rather than
by his clothing—­and at the outset one will
be astonished to find how much he has hitherto been
depending on the latter. It must be the same
with criminals, too, unless your criminal is an amateur
or a fool, in which event you will “land”
him without the trouble of disguising. A detective
furthermore should not be a handsome man or a man
of striking appearance in any way; the ideal plain-clothes
man is the little insignificant snipe whom even the
ladies will not notice.